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You know that newshound Ron Burgundy has animal magnetism when even Meryl Streep wants to rumble with him.

Or so thought Will Ferrell, Burgundy’s mild-mannered real-life alter ego. When Ferrell and his filmmaking co-conspirator Adam McKay were casting the sequel to Anchorman, their cult 2004 satire of local TV news, they heard from an impeccable source that Streep was dying to be in it.

She’s a huge fan of Ron Burgundy — maybe more than the mustachioed and macho Burgundy is of himself, if that’s even possible.

“We literally heard from Steve Carell that Meryl Streep was saying, ‘I’ll do anything! I’d love to be in that movie!’” Ferrell recalls during a recent Toronto visit to talk up Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which opens this week.

“And we were like, ‘Great! Let’s throw her in the gang fight!’ And then we never heard back, so I don’t know. We had a couple of those things (from other actors) where we heard, ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh!’ and then we’d offer them something and never hear back.

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“I don’t know if it was due to the gatekeepers in their world or if it was them going, ‘I said I’d do anything, but not that! I don’t want to throw an axe at someone!’ But more often than not, we just got all these amazing people who wanted to just come and play.”

The 6-foot-3 comic actor isn’t kidding. The neighbourhood gang fight between rival TV news teams, an absurd and bloody clash straight out of Monty Python, has ballooned from a few rising comic stars in ’04 into something that now resembles a gladiatorial version of a Golden Globes party.

The stars who did come out to join the dust-up are too numerous to mention and shouldn’t be mentioned to avoid spoiling the fun. Suffice to say there’s at least one Oscar winner among them and also a hockey stick-swinging news team that Canadians will find particularly funny.

We can broadcast that Steve Carell is back for Anchorman 2, again playing numbskull weatherman Brick Tamland, and this time he’s falling hard for a daffy receptionist, played by a totally game Kristen Wiig.

Also returning are Paul Rudd as ace reporter/cologne specialist Brian Fantana, David Koechner as clueless sports guy Champ “Whammy!” Kind and Christina Applegate as Veronica Corningstone, Burgundy’s classy lady and rival. They’re now at the end of the 1970s and the start of 24/7 news.

It was actually no trouble at all getting the old gang back together, Ferrell says, even though they all now possess significantly more star appeal than they did a decade ago.

“Everyone was absolutely gung-ho ... Everyone had the same story. They’d be at a junket, talking about another movie, and then they’d say halfway through the interview, all anyone wanted to talk about was Anchorman.”

But here’s the weird thing about the sequel: Paramount Pictures did have to be talked into making it, just as DreamWorks had to be persuaded to make the original film (full title: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy). The original Anchorman did good but not gangbuster business on its initial theatrical release. It gained steam when it went to video, but not enough to immediately convince Paramount’s pooh-bahs that a sequel was warranted.

“Everybody did this for a huge (pay) cut,” says Ferrell, 46, getting serious.

“We love it so much that we were like, ‘OK, we’ll just do it.’”

What was Paramount’s problem? Didn’t the studio realize that Ron Burgundy and Anchorman are kind of a big deal?

“They, as are most of the studios now, run very much by their business model ... they had taken the original movie and said, ‘It only made X amount at the box office; it only made X amount foreign. Based on those numbers, we can give you such-and-such a budget.’

“We came back and went, ‘But hold on, we’re all at much different places careerwise and what we make money-wise, and you’re wrong, this movie is 10 times more popular than you’re crediting.’

“No one wants to read about a high-paid actor taking a cut to make this movie, but it was a little bit like, ‘Really? We’ve got to fight you on this?’ That being said, they got a really funny and really good movie for a really good price. Ha, ha!”

The original idea for Anchorman 2, with McKay again directing and co-writing with Ferrell, was to have Burgundy’s Channel 4 news team travel from San Diego to Europe, for some fish-out-of-water yuks.

Instead, they go to New York City, just in time to join the graveyard shift for the dawn of non-stop cable news and the birth of a network a lot like CNN.

“We were trying to think of a way to force someone to pay for us to shoot on location in Europe, but we never really had an idea for that.

“And then we did have the more solid idea, setting it in 1980 with these guys at the beginning of 24-hour news. In the research that we did, they literally just needed bodies to fill the newsroom, to be on air, and they just had to hire massive amounts of people. So it kind of made sense that these guys would be on at 2 in the morning.”

For all of its abundant dumb fun, Anchorman 2 actually works in part as serious satire, mocking how news suddenly changed from Walter Cronkite announcing serious world events to pretty boys and girls doing the play-by-play of highway police chases.

“That’s why we were kind of licking our chops a little bit. We had hoped that in the best-case scenario this would be something that would be laugh- out-loud funny but at the same time we could kind of make some comments, and it seems to work both ways.”

Anchorman 2 also has jokes about the birth of crack cocaine, something that has nothing to do with the crack-smoking antics of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford — although Ferrell is delighted by the great timing.

“Depending on how you view it and what adjective you want to use, it was completely serendipitous,” he says, smiling mischievously.

Like most comedians, Ferrell has been making great sport of Ford. Dressed in his Ron Burgundy attire, he recently went on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show and sang Loverboy’s 1981 hit “Working for the Weekend,” offering it as the theme song for the Ford 2014 re-election campaign.

Ferrell can’t get enough of Ford, whom he met last year on a Toronto promotional visit for another movie.

“What a crazy story, right? Is it like the gift that keeps on giving with you guys or is it embarrassment?” Ferrell asks, laughing.

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